


mine is a devil's heart

by crickets



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:30:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets





	mine is a devil's heart

Even before she knows just how badly Klaus wants her, and for what reason, Katerina can sense the power he holds over everyone around him.

And she's still just a girl at this point - a girl whose heart still pumps hard in her chest with human life, who still gets winded at the end of a long run, who only knows the pain of being too far from home, of missing someone she knows she'll never meet again. But even in her young heart, she understands this truth about Klaus and she _knows_ she doesn't like it.

When he wants her, it's immediate and all-consuming. But when he doesn't, his childishness and selfishness only serves to drive a wedge further between them. His games are confusing and tiresome and the bruises he leaves on her arms where he grips her too tightly, taking her savagely in their chambers, are hardly worth all the fuss.

Elijah is, thankfully, different. And he is more than happy to lend her his ear on the days when Klaus' antics become too much. He greets her with tea and berries and his words always surprise her more than she expects them to.

"You have a poet's soul, my lord," she tells him. Her shy gaze drops to the spot at the table where their fingers almost touch and then meets his eyes again, a stillness falling around them. The moment lasts only as long as the silence in the room, both of their attention torn away by a clamor coming from the front of the house. Elijah's fingers encircle her wrist when it becomes clear that the commotion they hear is that of Niklaus barreling down the hall toward the kitchen, his voice raised to a bellow.

She shivers when Elijah presses against her in the small closet, his face only inches away, barely enough room for the cook's supplies let alone the two of them. He lifts a finger to his lips when she lets out a tiny, almost imperceptible squeak. Luckily for them, Rebekah is louder than the both of them, and his sister draws Klaus' attention to something out in the garden, the door slamming shut behind them.

Katerina grins, a laugh at the back of her throat.

_Elijah kisses her._

-

The Salvatores are an obvious mark.

The young men of the house both want her the moment they lay eyes upon her. Katherine, as she is now known, is a women of discerning taste, but also a woman of convenience. If you run long enough, you learn to understand which one is most important. In this case, her needs are equally met. Of course it is certainly no accident or coincidence of fate that she's in Mystic Falls, and thankfully for her, she will have greater luck at accomplishing her agenda with them at her side.

Damon falls quickly.

Katherine drags him to her bed with all the force of warm breath on a goose feather. There is a sweetness about him, to be sure, and a recklessness too. But there is also a self consciousness that she knows can quickly turn into something ugly. There are times she senses that he is entirely terrified of her, yet at the same moment completely infatuated, and Katherine can read him like a book.

He fancies himself an apprentice, and Katherine is more than willing to oblige. Damon gets what he wants, feels like he belongs, feels privy to some deep dark secret, and Katherine gets what she needs in return.

She has learned over the years to use lies to her advantage, but when Damon swallows them up with all the eagerness of kisses, Katherine can't help but feel a little bit guilty.

( _But only a little._ )

The other Salvatore, however, is a tougher nut to crack.

In the first days of her seduction, Stefan looks upon her with equal measure of trust and suspicion. His words fall heavy from his lips, as if each one has passed some sort of rigorous test. _No_ , Stefan is not like his brother, who is completely free in his speech. Stefan is more careful, somehow less afraid, and strangely idealistic. And Katherine knows she is going to have to earn him.

When he finally lets her take him to her bed, Katherine is sure that she has never been more in love with another (human, at least) in her entire life. He reminds her of Elijah, in some ways, the way he looks at her, the way he runs his hands down her sides and makes her lose all of her careful patience.

The betrayed sound Stefan makes when she sinks her teeth into his neck for the first time breaks her cold, dead, heart.

-

Katherine's memories play tricks on her.

She remembers waking up in bed, Elijah at her side. Her mouth is dry and she sits up, reaching across him for the glass perched on her bedside table.

" _Katerina_."

Elijah's voice is thick with sex, and his teeth nip at the underside of her breasts before he pulls her down across his chest.

Then she's laughing and he's turning her over and she's buried in soft bedding and his skin pressed against hers.

" _Mine_ ," he growls, and he doesn't have to slide his hand behind her neck because she's already arching up to meet his hungry lips, her brain pounding: _Yours, yours, yours..._

-

The truth is, Katherine can give Damon what he's always wanted.

She shows back up in Mystic Falls, and despite everything, he still wants her. And Katherine is nothing if not a woman of compromise. If she doesn't get what she wants, there is always something else around the corner: This time, it's Damon.

But Damon, the fool that he is, still unable to shed that self-doubt that plagued him all those years ago, can't just take her the way she is right in front of him, her head thrown back, his lips at her neck, a heady invitation in her voice.

_No._

That won't be enough for Damon, who, _when she really looks at him?_ , hasn't changed a bit. He's still got that deer in the headlights expression in his eyes, and Katherine knows, just as she did then, that with one subtle movement on her part _she can break him._

Before she can stop him, he poses a question that he doesn't even have to ask, his voice begging for the truth. And Katherine, suddenly finding herself incapable of lying to him when he's looking so vulnerable, gives it:

_It's always been Stefan._

She knows he will never take her hand again the way he did when he was human, knows that he will never again follow her blindly down any troubled path.

Knows that he will love her anyway, _despite himself._

-

In the beginning, Elena infuriates her.

She remembers feeling all of those feelings. She remembers what it's like to be a _real girl_.

But never so strongly as when she looks the human, Elena Gilbert, in the eyes.

Being back in the Salvatore boarding house, _working for the team_... it's enough to make a girl sick.

Elena is _essentially_ her, without all the years of heartache and without all the blood that taints Katherine's hands. And she would be fooling herself if she didn't recognize there was some kind of twisted _Snow White_ metaphor happening here: Elena's purity being the one thing Katherine will never have again.

 _Mirror, mirror, on the wall_...

Stefan crosses the expanse of the main room and takes Elena's hand.

 _Well,_ not the _only_ thing.

-

The Gilbert boy is kind of this odd fascination that Katherine just can't shake.

It doesn't help that every time she sees him she remembers his blood on her lips in that godforsaken tomb. Even more damning is the fact that she remembers his hard-on pressed against the inside of her thigh each and every time she drained him until he didn't have enough blood to blink let alone get it up. Aside from a giggle or two against his neck, Katherine hadn't tortured him over that fact too harshly.

People do some pretty _fucked up shit_ when they know they're about to die, and Katherine knows this all too well.

After they find Mikael, she's under this odd impression that the two of them are friends, which is just silly really, because Katherine doesn't _have_ friends, and definitely not friends who are still in high school the first time around.

When she catches him snooping around her new place one night, she drags him into the basement and has him up against the wall, the stake slapped away from his hand and one leg wedged between his. Her lips brush past rough stubble on their way to his ear. "You still sporting that ring, Gilbert? Because I'd _love_ a taste."

He spits out some line about only observing her for training, his voice trembling and hoarse, says something about a Gilbert family legacy, and Katherine is forced to swallow his mouth in hers in an effort to shut him up.

Two seconds after she shoves her hand down the front of his pants, he's coming all over her fingers, a strangled cry at the back of his throat.

" _Fuck_ ," she grumbles. "Ruin all my fun."

Ten minutes later, Jeremy Gilbert is pounding her against the dirt floor of the basement, and she starts to believe for the first time that she might be going to hell.

_And she knows this won't be the last._

-

There is a sick twist in her gut when Katherine is reminded that Stefan will never love her in the way that she loves him - in the way that he loves Elena.

When he turns her over onto her stomach, pressing into her from behind, filthy things pushing past his lips, his fingers digging at her waist, his voice a dark growl, his fangs sinking deep into her shoulder when he comes - _she knows_.

Later she lays on his chest as he smokes cigarettes and runs a hand through the length of her hair.

"This isn't you, Stefan," she tells him, _and she means it._

Stefan blows a ring of smoke from his useless lungs and puts the cigarette out. He sleeps wrapped around her, his fingers curled at the back of her neck, and for a little while _Katherine can pretend._

-

When she pulls the dagger out of his chest, she fully expects him to throttle her right then and there.

She can't actually recall if she's done anything lately to deserve it, but if anyone has a right to administer a good throttling, it might as well be Elijah, after all the years of her running, and Elijah trying to stay one step ahead of his brother - one step, as it turns out, closer to her.

But when the color drains back into his face and he opens his eyes, he only says one word, his hand reaching out to brush her hair behind her ear.

" _Katerina_?"

Katherine closes her eyes, presses her forehead to his. "You're awake," she grins, meeting his eyes and remembering a time in the not-so-distant past when he had her under his compulsion.

She moves away, but only slightly, when Elijah captures her wrist in his fingers.

"I knew it would be you," he tells her. "I knew."

_-fin_  



End file.
